As part of my Baptiste Power Yoga Teacher Certification, I was asked to submit an essay about why I teach Baptiste Power Vinyasa. It's sort of long, so I'm going to post it in installments. Read on for part 1...

I spent many years dating around in the yoga world. I’d try one style of yoga for a while, then be over it and find something new to satisfy my need for physical and spiritual nourishment. Some of these forays into a certain style of yoga didn’t last past the first date (e.g. Shiva Rea’s Trance Dance) while others went on for years (Ashtanga) and became an important part of my day-to-day life. Even in the long term relationships, though, I always had a sense that the practice was not exactly right for me. While I was deep into the second year of my relationship with Ashtanga, I went on a date with Baptiste Power Vinyasa. I had an ecstatic experience, but I was so involved with my Ashtanga practice, that I wasn’t sure what to do. My heart wanted to dump Ashtanga but my head kept telling me that my Ashtanga practice had supported me for so long, that I should not jump ship.

In the months that followed, I started to dabble in the Baptiste practice a little more. I’d travel to Jacksonville for a workshop at MBody Yoga and even took a weekend workshop with Baron Baptiste. At the same time I would do the Primary Series every morning and even signed up for and attended David Swenson’s Ashtanga Yoga Teacher training. The training was great but I left conflicted. Having studied at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore a couple of years earlier, I had been steeped in the tradition and taught that the only “legitimate” Astanga teachers were authorized by the Jois family.  As a life-long rule-follower I was having a hard time deciding to teach Ashtanga without being “legit.” I also firmly believe that a good yoga teacher practices what they teach. So I was in a pickle. I practiced Ashtanga, but felt like I wasn’t good enough to teach it, even though I had been teaching yoga classes for several years at that point.  

Within a month of returning from that training, I signed up for Mark White’s Baptiste inspired teacher training at MBody. I had only taken a handful of Baptiste classes at that point, but felt in my heart like it was the right thing to do.

It would be nice to say that during my first weekend of teacher training I fell out of love and jumped in to Baptiste Power Vinyasa with both feet. The truth is that like with many long term relationships, the breakup was slow and painful. I was so attached to my way of doing things that Mark White had to use a lot of force to get me to let go of my old way of being. The truth was that I still loved Ashtanga but knew that I needed to move on. Like any relationship, the practice had run its course and taught me some incredible values and lessons. In the end, though we weren’t meant to be lifelong partners.

The good news was that Baptiste Power Vinyasa and I had an amazing physical relationship right from the start.  Every time I practiced I was amazed at how great my body felt - I was buzzing from head to toe and didn’t have any pain at all! In previous practices, I would typically push myself to the point of at least some ache or pain - but  it was the “good kind” of pain, I would tell myself. In this practice, even when I worked heard or Mark kept us in frog pose for 15 minutes, I would wake up the next day feeling great.